House Rule for HR 2055

I mentioned in last night's blog post that there were some strange sounding provisions in the Rule that the House Rules Committee adopted last night for the consideration of HR 2055. After I got to bed the Committee staff finally (it was a long night for them, I hope they get overtime pay, probably not) go the tule posted on the web site. Those odd-ball provisions do not really concern the considetation of HR 2055, but deal with HR 3672, the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2012, and H. Con. Res. 94, a resolution dealing with that bill. Those games are interesting (if you're a political junky), but not really germane to this blog.

There are two interesting additions to the rule that do apply to HR 2055, the first authorizes consideration of a continuing resolution today and the second provides for same day consideration of a bill (well, some specific type bills including HR 2055) under a rule. Both are essentially waivers of current House Rules to allow Congress to actually complete action on the spending bills before the end of the first session of the 112th Congress.

The conintuing resolution should be a short term, probably a week, resolution, but that is not specified in this rule. Chairman Drieer (R,CA) explained last night that the 2200+ page document submitted by the Conference Committee is not a documant that can really go to the President. Glancing at the documents on-line it is clear that they are a hodgepodge of printed documents with hand written corrections and modifications. It could take a couple of days to get the final document in a proper state for the President's signature. And the bill can't go into effect until the President signs it.

The 'same day' provision in the rule will allow the House to consider HR 2055 today and is necessary because the Rule was published (even agreed to) after midnight this morning. Actually, House Rules {clause 6(a) of rule XIII} do provide for same day consideration, but it requires a 2/3 vote to authorize that consideration. The leadership, probably correctly, decided that they could not guarnatee a 2/3 vote so they waived the Rule.

HR 2055 – The [New] Consolidated Appropriations Act 2012

The 112^th Congress is getting to be the experts in last minute deals. Apparently the Senate was not interested in the new language in HR 3671 that the House drafted. A deal was then brokered on language more acceptable to the Senate and still reasonably acceptable to the House. So to make it easy to get it passed in both houses of Congress they had the Conference Committee for HR 2055, the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012, substitute the new appropriations language for the Senate amendment to HR 2055. Who says that there are no creative people in Congress (well more likely their staffs)?

As with HR 3671, the two divisions of this bill (out of a total of 9) that will probably contain provisions of the most interest to the chemical- and cyber-security communities are Division A (DOD) and Division D (DHS). This bill has an identical Division D, Title V, §540 that would extend the CFATS authorization until October 4, 2012.

NOTE: I have never understood why Congress doesn’t just change that date to reflect the end of the fiscal year like almost everything else in the appropriations bills. It would result in a four-days-less-than-a-year extension when they did it, but those four days are meaningless without the appropriations that take effect on October 1^st.

I’m glad I didn’t waste any time today (waste in hindsight) reviewing the details of HR 3671 as it is now dead in the dusty files of the Library of Congress.

As I write this the House Rules Committee is finishing up their rule hearing, which started at 11:45 pm EDT. The rule is a closed rule (as with the standard post-Conference Committee rule), but it includes a couple of interesting details which I’m not sure that I understood from the part of the discussion that I heard. It will be interesting to read the rule.

In any case Chairman Drier (R,CA) noted that he expected the debate on the rule on the House floor to begin at about 10:00 am EST tomorrow morning.

House Consideration of HR 3671

With tomorrow being the current deadline for funding the government for the remainder of the year, there isn’t much time to consider HR 3671 in ‘regular order’. The House Rule Committee web site early this morning added the bill to the list of legislation that is ‘likely to be considered pursuant to a rule’ this week, but no hearing has yet been set to formulate that rule.

NOTE: There ‘appears’ to be a typo on that listing. It says that the bill was added to the site on “12/14/2011 at 12:37 AM”. I’m sure that it should read “12/15/2011 at 12:37 AM” as I was checking the site last night at 11:00 pm EST.

The rule hearing will almost certainly be held this afternoon, allowing for a vote on Friday. The is an alternative procedure that the leadership could use to bring this measure to the floor and that is to consider it under a ‘suspension of the rules’ which requires a 2/3 majority vote instead of a simple majority. Usually this is not allowed under House Rules on Thursdays and Fridays {Clause 1(c) of rule XV}, but a provision of H Res 493, the rule for the consideration of HR 1540, allows the ‘suspension of the rules’ provision to be used on any day for the remainder of the first session of the 112^th Congress.

I would suspect that the leadership will use a closed rule to consider this bill so as to limit debate and the amendment process. It would be very difficult (but not impossible) to be assured of a 2/3 vote for a final spending bill in this Congress. Of course since the initial vote on suspension of the rules is not actually a vote on the bill, if it fails to achieve a 2/3 majority the bill can still be brought up again in ‘regular order’.

There is still a possibility that we might see a short (1 week) continuing resolution to allow for a more extended debate/amendment process on the bill. It is unlikely since this bill was worked out between the Senate and House Appropriations Committees and any significant amendments may make passage more complicated (possible conference committee requirements for instance).